American Medium is pleased to present new sculpture, video and wall works by Harm van den Dorpel. Just-in-Time is Harm van den Dorpel's first solo exhibition with the gallery. Just-in-Time will be on view from February 20th - April 3rd.

Harm has a Wikipedia page. Harm is 33-34 years of age. Wikipedia calls him a ‘conceptual artist'. What the fuck does that mean in 2014?

[Madonna:]
Come on boy I've been waiting for somebody to pick up my stroll
[Justin:]
Now don't waste time, give me desire, tell me how you wanna roll

Harm has chosen me to write about his work because I seem like someone who hates the art world, a post-artist, someone who has decided to give up. I'm trying to gauge if he wants me to tear his practice apart. I'm trying to figure out what that would mean. Is it BDSM?

The title of the show, Just In Time, reminds me of 'Justin’ and ‘In Time', Timberlake's flop star turn in the 2011 dystopian Sci-Fi thriller. Like all Sci-Fi movies it was about the time when it was made. In the film time is literally money. You buy and sell your minutes, your years. The rich have more time. The usual, then. NYC.

[Madonna and Justin:]
If you want it
You've already got it
If you thought it
It better be what you want

I think the show is 'about’ programmer workflows and how they are visualized in corporate environments. Charts and drawings and post-its and mind maps and shit.

Harm:
the aim of the text is not to make sure people will want to see the show
i think it should be more about giving context
im very very confused about being an artist
as you might have noticed in the chats

Jaakko:
yeah
i'm confused about it too, like my ‘practice’

Harm:
on the verge of quitting all the time

I'm scrolling up this Facebook chat window. We've been chatting about the press release a lot. What can be said? Nothing has been said, almost. Harm's responses are evasive (elusive?), which might be fine. I feel like my role is to understand and report back, but maybe that's not necessary. I'm kinda over understanding tbh. I'm into being near something. I don't really get Harm's work. I can be near it though.

[Madonna:]
You gotta get em a heart
Tick tock tick tock tick tock

“Men always want to be influential. I see that somewhat as an onlooker. Do I see myself as influential? No, I want to understand. If others understand in the same way I’ve understood that gives me a sense of satisfaction, like being among equals.”
– Hannah Arendt

Harm:
i think thats the point of doing it
putting some thoughts and ideas there, and then see what other people think about that
thats the thrill
in this quote of hers, im not on the side of the ‘men’

Harm has introduced this quote into our chat. He is onto something. I immediately challenge him in a predictable way, pointing out that Hannah Arendt was massively influential and accomplished, that this humility rings false.

We start talking about failure and I paste a quote about how failure exhibited is reframing it as a success and somehow really neoliberal or something. I'm trying to be analytical and sharp but I'm kinda worn down and foggy.

Harm van den Dorpel's work is about language, process and infrastructure. When he makes images they are about other images. They're like lol what is an image anyways.

[Justin:]
But if I die tonight at least I can say I did what I wanted to do
Tell me how 'bout you?

“There are various ways to become invisible: one is to become transparent; another is to put up an opaque shield. Neither tactic is fully realizable.”
– Elvia Wilk

Harm:
one way is to be like a chameleon and mimic your environment
then people also dont see you

I think I kinda want what Harm wants but I'm using opposite methods. He wants to be invisible so as not to be influential, to not be one of the men. He wants to understand. He has chosen an opaque shield. Maybe the shield changes color according to its surroundings. It's online and off. I'm trying to be transparent.

Harm:
i tried to read agamben
and he says something interesting about absolute potentiality
which means
decide to rather not do anything
i just in general feel incapable of expressing in art pieces the stuff that really interests me

Two things stick out to me. First of all I'm like wait are you reverse psychologizing me to legitimize your practice for you by saying that it has nothing to do with what really interests you? Then I'm like wait how does not doing anything work up to absolute potentiality.

Harm:
maybe im trying to legitimize my focus on process, thought and all other aspects of creation that happen before actually creating something substantial and possible to communicate . maybe decide in the end to leave it unrealized, unactualized
uncommunicated
because the incentives to actually make something are unclear to me - because they are so wound up in other processes. like market stuff, and who's going to see it anyway

[Madonna and Justin:]
If you want it
You've already got it
If you thought it
It better be what you want

If you feel it
It must be real just
Say the word and
I'm gonna give you what you want

Glugging in the intersections of time and knowing cause and effect with time to pause and reflect, so that what is left behind is idealized. Coming to terms with events in your past, rewriting them with a positive spin, as each of time’s shapes arrives in loops, the quadradirectional cogniscent allows time to prepare for and deal with the shapes of the arriving present.

Jake Borndal lives and works in New York. He recently received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Solo exhibitions include Chit Chat at ΚΘΦ Gallery, Richmond; Pot Holder at Gallery Four, Baltimore; and Pot Hole at Terminal Projects, Brooklyn. His work has been included in group shows at venues such as Material Art Fair, Mexico City; Reunion Gallery, Zurich; Mass MoCA; Le Magasin, Grenoble; MoMA PS1, Postmasters Gallery, and Pierogi in New York, among others.

An artist book entitled Solipsistic Trollop Mystic will accompany the show with writing by Savannah Knoop and Kate Scherer.

As difficult as it is to make art, perhaps it’s even harder to destroy it once it’s made.

Destruction—literally, figuratively, formally, and conceptually—has a long and well-known pedigree in modern and contemporary art. From Robert Rauschenberg to Jean Tinguely, Robert Smithson, Yoko Ono, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gustav Metzger, and Pipilotti Rist, destruction has served as a rich resource in the evolution of critical art practice and a key idea in the development of the expanded field of art in the 1960s and 1970s.

Yet what might be its aesthetic and critical place in culture today? In order to explore these and related questions, the curators have invited the artists not to destroy just something, but rather one of their own preexisting works—and to develop a protocol for this act of destruction that will become, at some level, what is being exhibited. How does the destruction of an artist’s own work ask us to rethink issues of materiality, performance and memory? How does it enable us to think about the changing conditions of art history in the digital age?

Included in the exhibition is a newly destroyed piece by Bob and Roberta Smith, whose exhibition Art Amnesty was previously shown at Pierogi and is on view at MoMA P.S.1 through March 23, 2015, and a video documenting the destruction of faulty elements of Nina Katchadourian’s Monument to the Unelected, a work consisting of 56 signs advertising the presidential campaigns of every person who ever ran for president, and lost, and now in the permanent collection of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (the work was also exhibited at the Boiler in July, 2012). Also on view will be a re-staging/destruction of Jeanine Oleson’s Hear, Here (2014), an experimental Opera produced at the New Museum in April, 2014. Ray Smith will direct a live destruction of a monumental exquisite corpse-like sculpture.

The exhibition coincides with the establishment of the Foundation for Destroyed Art (www.foundationfordestroyedart.org), a non-profit media archive in which works of art will exist only in their documented destruction and spectral afterlife. The aim of the Foundation is to serve as a unique online resource and archive of destroyed works available in virtual formats, an institution that can hold if not entirely contain the formlessness of destruction in the field of art.

The Parlour Bushwick is pleased to present Show #15. The opening reception will take place Friday February 27, 2015 from 6:00 – 9:00 pm. The gallery is located at 791 Bushwick Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11221. The exhibition will run until Sunday April 5, 2015. The gallery is open Sunday, from 12:00 pm – 5:00 pm and by appointment.

The works in Show #15 use formal elements to visualize a sense of control while embracing the futility of it. Ripped edges, burn holes, images disintegrating and disappearing, give in the darker side of order and explore an emotional side that seems to lie beneath the surface.

Sue Havens’ work creates pleasing compositions of shape, color and texture that also present a certain discord. The exacting structure holds an element of stress. Pleasing colors become jarring, hard edges but up against wobbly ones, colors held within varied planes seem to want to break out of the grid creating a sort of pulsing play between harmony and disorder

Jen Hitchings' paintings describe emotional states. Waves of color, lines and dots move between collective communities and individuals in altered states to create a form of non-verbal communication. Humans are loosely rendered and are there to designate where the energy is coming and going. Sometimes the work takes on an otherworldly feeling or a spiritual reckoning, other times they seem to be taking a turn towards the dark side of excess and being out of control.

Pamela Council creates sculpture out of deluxe fabrics and man-made objects. She uses the fabric as a sort of stand-in for the human figure and manipulates the surface in different ways such as screen-printing, acid burns, dying and painting. This helps to create the personality of the piece as well as a story behind it. The marks and holes act as both an emotional narrative and a personal response to “the textile industry, class struggles, gendered work, and spiritual and physical trauma.”

Lana Z Caplans video “play, and repeat” is a layered collage of images of New York City each one erasing the other. To view the video is to experience someone's perception of a place through images appearing only to quickly be replaced by another thus leaving the viewer with a fleeting memory of what was there.

We are all in the grip of the stories we tell and hear every day of our lives, vast jumbles of threads of narratives that wrap around each other in endless knots. Using the oldest and simplest of story telling tools, sticks and drums to give impetus and rhythm, and charcoal and paper to fill in the details, Tim Spelios and Matt Freedman will embark on a month of story telling. The stories will be drawn and told by Freedman, but they will take their irregular rhythm and form from the aberrant and improvised syncopation of Spelios’ broken time drumming. This ongoing project will be divided into eight performances. Every Friday at 8pm and Sunday at 5pm during the run of the show Spelios and Freedman will tell another story.

It is not true that every story has to start somewhere, any more than it is true that every story has to end somewhere. In fact, the more we try to tell any single story, the more confused we get. There is always something to add, a more ancient originating moment, an illuminating aside, a surprising consequence that puts things in proper perspective. It’s silly almost, to even begin to tell one particular story, because the singularity of such a thing is a presumptuous notion. No story exists in isolation, but oddly enough that’s the reason we have to tell stories as if they do stand alone. We pull details out of a morass of coincidence and irrelevance and construct narratives designed to show that the universe works in some understandable, meaningful way. No less persuasive than magic or religion, as compelling as science, the secular act of story telling makes meaning where there is none and gives purpose where there is no point.

Matt Freedman and Tim Spelios

The installation includes eight different mutable drum sets, one for each performance that Tim Spelios has used in musical performances; some built as functional sculptures. In addition there will be 30 stools built for the exhibition for the audience to use each night in various configurations depending on the location of the performance. The 20-40 drawings that Matt Freedman produces for each performance will collect in the gallery for the remainder of the exhibition. Some will be framed and some will just be pinned to the walls. The room will gradually fill up with the detritus of all the stories.

MINUS SPACE is delighted to present the group exhibition Breaking Pattern, highlighting several generations of artists whose works investigate and advance the discourse around pattern, optical, and perceptual abstract painting. The exhibition will feature recent paintings by five New York City-area artists: Gabriele Evertz, Anoka Faruqee, Gilbert Hsiao, Douglas Melini, and Michael Scott. This exhibition coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal exhibition The Responsive Eye curated by William C. Seitz.

Anoka Faruqee (b. 1972, Michigan) earned her MFA from the Tyler School of Art in 1997 and her BA in Painting from Yale University in 1994. Her work has been exhibited in the US and abroad at venues, including MoMA/PS1 (Long Island City, NY), Albright-Knox Gallery (Buffalo, NY), and Hosfelt Gallery (San Francisco, CA) among others. Faruqee is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program, and residencies at the Skowhegan School of Art and the PS1 National Studio Program. Her grants include the Pollock Krasner Foundation and Artadia. Currently, Faruqee is an Associate Professor at the Yale School of Art, and has previously held positions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Cal Arts, where she was Co-Director of the Art Program.

Gilbert Hsiao (b. 1956, Pennsylvania) has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including in Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Thailand, and the United States. He has mounted solo exhibitions at Dr. Julius | AP (Berlin, Germany), Gallery Sonja Roesch (Houston, TX), and White Columns (New York, NY), among others. Recent museum exhibitions include the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (Houston, TX), Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (Ithaca, NY), Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (North Adams, MA), Gesellschaft für Kunst und Gestaltung (Bonn, Germany), and MoMA/PS1 (Long Island City, NY). He has received awards from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation and New York Foundation for the Arts. Hsiao is a member of American Abstract Artists and he studied Art History at Columbia University (New York, NY) before receiving a BFA from Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY).

Douglas Melini (b. 1972, New Jersey) has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. He mounted recent solo exhibitions at Eleven Rivington, Feature (both NYC), and The Suburban (Chicago, IL). Melini was awarded a Painting Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2008. His work has been reviewed in publications, such as Artcritical, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, Huffington Post, and Time Out New York. His work is included in corporate and private collections worldwide, including The Daimler Collection, Neuberger Berman, The Progressive Corporation, The Phillip Schrager Collection, and Wellspring Capital Corporation. Melini holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, CA, and a BA from the University of Maryland, MD.

Michael Scott (b. 1958, Pennsylvania) has exhibited his work internationally for the past three decades, including at Le Consortium (Dijon, France), MoMA/PS1 (New York, NY), Le FRAC (Nord-Pas de Calais, France), Musée des Beaux Arts (La Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland), Centre National d’art Contemporain de Grenoble (Grenoble, France), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, (Geneva, Switzerland), and MAMCO (Geneva, Switzerland). He received his BA from Hamilton College in Clinton, NY and his MFA from Hunter College, NYC.

SUPPORT
We would like to thank Koenig & Clinton Gallery and Sandra Gering Gallery for their assistance with this exhibition.

The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.
- Sigmund Freud
Slag Contemporary is pleased to present From the Depths, an exhibition featuring recent works by Brooklyn-based artists, Ben Godward and Catalin Moldoveanu.
Both artists are currently investigating color and form, using distinct styles to create process-oriented, intuitive works. Godward utilizes plastic, rubber, found objects, urethane foam, and occasionally of nail polish to form contemporary monuments of toxic excess. Moldoveanu, for his part, toys with a variety of painting methods in a thickly layered, yet spontaneous take on abstract expressionism without the machismo.
There is a distinct American-ness about the attention-demanding vibrancy of the sculptures Ben Godward creates - syrupy plasticine endeavors that excite the eye with their over-saturated, candy-coated feel. Drawing inspiration from his own surroundings in New York, Godward tackles the vibrant toxicity of American consumerism with his neon, varicolored installations. His large, bright works bulge with corporeal greed, nearing a physical equivalent of a blaring television commercial. As he writes himself, “My sculptures respond to the slick and saturated media of the world we live in. They are reflections of myself, contradictory and impulsive.” Godward is all about playing with materials. While his pieces easily read as a critique of American superabundance, there is no self-aggrandizing manifesto the works ascribe to; they exist instead as organic growths of the world around them.
Similarly, Moldoveanu follows the pursuit of formal play/push of color intersecting with emotion and inspiration, albeit in two dimensions. While well versed in philosophy, his work, for all its variety, remains securely focused on process and materials, not on complex philosophical concerns. With that in mind, it could be said he follows a Jungian philosophy of dream expression, as the light and faint outlines of shape in his works with have the tenuous nature of the unconscious. Starting each work in monochrome, Moldoveanu uses a painter’s intuition and a variety of techniques to compose his works, covering the canvas in a palimpsest of paint over an extended period of time. Sidestepping the pitfalls and clichés of conceptual art, he prefers instead to tap into his subconscious for his layered explorations of color, technique, and form. “In dreams,” Moldoveanu muses, “figures do not cast shadows, they emit light.”
Catalin Moldoveanu currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He studied at the Art Students League from 2006 – 2009, and completed his BA in Studio Art at Hunter College in 2009. He has shown at Centotto, The Hole, The Loom, BOS, Chelsea Art Museum, Tompkins Square Library Gallery, Gitana Rosa Gallery, and the Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery.
Ben Godward was born in Indianapolis, grew up in St. Louis, MO and received his B.F.A. at Alfred University and an M.F.A. in Sculpture from the University at Albany where he won the 2007 Outstanding Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture award. After Albany, Godward moved his studio to Brooklyn, where he currently lives. He has shown extensively in NYC including at Sardine, Fortress to Solitude Lesley Heller, Moti Hassan, The Laundromat Gallery, Pocket Utopia, Centotto, Famous Accountants Gallery, Way Out Gallery, NYCAMS, Norte Maar, Storefront Gallery and Factory Fresh among others. Ben has also completed large outdoor public art projects, in 2010 at Franconia Sculpture Park in MN and in 2011 at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, NY. Ben’s work has been featured in The L Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Sculpture magazine and on WNYC Radio.
For press inquiries and reproductions, contact Irina Protopopescu at 917-977-1848.
For general inquiries, contact the gallery at
212-967-9818, or visit www.slaggallery.com

“My path as an artist has been a constant reassessment, recalculation and re-direction. There are roads not taken that are never encountered again. There are things I cannot control, patterns I understand and can even predict, but they are still disruptive.” Nancy Lunsford

440 Gallery proudly presents Recalculating..., a solo exhibition of new work by one of the founding members of the gallery, Nancy Lunsford. The work will be on view from March 26 - April 26, 2015. Lunsford is concurrently participating in the Affordable Art Fair with 440 Gallery (booth 2.10) the weekend of March 25 - 29. An opening reception for the artist's solo show at the gallery will be held a week later on Thursday, April 2nd, from 6-8pm.

For her fifth solo show at 440, Lunsford invokes the GPS voice that automatically recalculates the route when you make an unexpected turn. She has long been fascinated with patterns and their repetition, but lately this interest has turned toward disruptive life patterns, with a specific focus on pregnancy, death, religion and art, as agents of change. Personal narrative remains a central theme, and her family and Appalachian upbringing figure prominently in this new work. Just as certain themes recur, so does Lunsford's adaptive and multifaceted use of many media and styles - from collage and printmaking, to photography and video.

Lunsford's artistic career began in Nashville doing portraiture, courtroom sketching and mural painting. After a stint as a singer/songwriter, she moved to Brooklyn in 1976, and earned a degree in art history and English literature from New York University. She then spent ten years abroad, in Indonesia and Turkey, where she made art, wrote art reviews, and studied traditional shadow theater and court dance.

Upon returning to New York, Lunsford ran Wisteria Art Space in Brooklyn, curating exhibits and producing theater pieces. She also collaborated on installations at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition and the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center. A weekly sketch group that met in Lunsford's studio was the catalyst for a group exhibition that eventually led to the founding of 440 Gallery with Shanee Epstein in 2005.

440 Gallery is located at 440 Sixth Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, between 9th and 10th Streets, and is convenient to the F, G, and R subways. The gallery is open on Thursday and Friday, 4-7pm, and Saturday and Sunday, 11am - 7pm, or by appointment.

Jasmine Murrell presents “Some Impossibility Without A Name,” an installation for Open Source Gallery.

How can we begin again at the end? Where is the beginning of nothingness? Where is the end of our illusions dressed as mass media and 24-hour TV? How bad did it hurt before — or are we just moving in waves? “Some Impossibility Without A Name” is inspired by the undercurrent that holds us all, the substance older than thought, the elements we are made of and will eventually return to.

Murrell manipulates and transforms iconic materials to create alternate forms, constructing new objects, spaces, and realities that reflect our phenomenal way of life. She reframes historic associations that we may have with materials and objects to revisit the past while re-inventing the present. Murrell’s work reminds us of the events and history behind us, as well as the unknowable future that lies ahead. Humanity is constantly shifting and transforming – creating, remembering, forgetting. While it is easily obscured by the commotion of our daily lives, we are all a part of a much larger narrative than what we can see, connected throughout space and time. “Some Impossibility Without a Name” discovers the indefinable, yet palpable, ways in which trauma manifests and dissolves itself in our memories and histories.

Jasmine Murrell is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist. She received her BFA from the Parson School of Design and her MFA from Hunter College. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally over the past decade in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Bronx Museum of the Arts, African-American Museum of Art, Art Basel, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Jasmine’s work has also been published in the New York Times, Amsterdam News, NY1 News, and the Detroit New. She is also a member of the artist collective HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, which will be exhibiting at the Rotterdam Museum this spring.

NURTUREart is pleased to present Upward Inflection, an exhibition of new work by Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, in his first solo presentation in New York.

Through its complicated systems and slightly alien mechanics, Ó Dochartaigh’s new work lends itself to a soft darkness. It taps into the excitement and naivety of the computer age. At the heart of his installation lies a machine that distances itself from familiarity, while still emanating intrinsically human qualities.

Upward Inflection, Ó Dochartaigh’s newest project, is rooted in an irrational fear of death, loneliness, memory decay and the forgotten. This gallery-wide installation takes its starting point from the mug shot of Danny Ray (aka “The Cape Man,” James Brown's personal valet and master of ceremonies). An unnamed actor who specializes in improvisation activates Ray’s portrait delivering a monologue while flipping rhythmically between the role of the “Master of Ceremonies,” and the “Hype Man.” The script loosely explores the interpersonal politics and social structures inherent within the performer’s respective characters. Captured in his own environment, the actor was asked to film the sequence as a series of rehearsals in a budget hotel room, having been given access to the script with limited cues and props. The performer recounts his time spent with Patrick in climate control room 2, where he reminisces on the untimely death of smiley culture and the cultural legacy of Foghorn J Leghorn.

All the while we are left marooned in an environment made from a customized Dexion shelving/rack structure, simultaneously common and uncanny. This structural body houses a toolkit and lab, which seems to be keeping the rhythm for the actor’s performance.

This exhibition was generously co-funded by the British Council of Northern Ireland.

“In De Rerum Natura the medium between the terrestrial and the celestial is depicted as a bird, an animal that goes between both planes of reality at will. Upon the backs of many of these birds is a community of houses, perhaps signifying the unsteadiness of life and how one’s shelter can abruptly change, or that one can take their sense of shelter wherever they go. Home is where the heart is, as it is said. But one will notice that this sense of security is challenged by the presence of fire. Fire is a significant alchemical symbol, generally represented as one’s will. Fire is also representative of transformation, as fire turns form, representing the terrestrial, into smoke, the celestial.”

Decadence Darling, Beautiful Bizare 2015

“One of the most compelling aspects of Chimney’s symbol-filled imagery is the apparent moral ambiguity. The creatures inhabiting the vast, melancholic landscapes are unclear in their intentions, with their strange, chimerical bodies appearing both gentle and wicked. Many of them are preparing for abstract duals with one another, the reasons for which remain unknown. ”

Haley Evan, Beautiful Decay Magazine 2015

Following the steps of famous storytellers, El Gato Chimney uses animals, made-up or real, often hiding behind masks and always wearing ceremonial clothes from European folklore and Oceanic tribes cultures, to depict the vices and the virtues of the world around him. The universe he portrays is dual and deceptive, like a good horror story. The animals are drawn in vivid colors, but the details on them, the colorful clothes and masks that adorn these mysterious characters, act as a kind of warning, making them look likable and scary at the same time. A magical and religious syncretism is what livens up the inhabitants of these lands,
a well-turned mixture of cultures and eras, as the artist wants to assert that celebrating life and escaping death is what joins all beings."

I'm not sure about relating your work to the ***********. It's too one to one, and I think it sort of minimizes the impact of your work. Because your work isn't naive. And I think your work has always been about existing without explanation or references, and this reference is very literal.

Chloe Seibert (b. 1989, New York) lives and works in Chicago, and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Glasgow School of Art. Recent exhibitions include HQHQ (Portland), David Shelton Gallery (Dallas), Queer Thoughts (Nicaragua), Bodega (New York), and a presentation at NADA Miami Beach with Courtney Blades. This will be her first solo exhibition in New York.

The artists assembled in “City Limit” were chosen for how their work responds to the socialization of our collectively shared space—as an environment simultaneously conceived, perceived and experienced.

Utilizing the distance between artist and subject matter, these works function as composed records of the margins of urban culture and the familiarity of suburban settings, delimited by the encroachment of commercialization.

Through the presence of the lens, as well as the presence of the artist, concept and technique, aesthetic formalism and documentary realism come into confluence. What we're left with are records of human behavior, filtered through regions, centers and peripheries within the landscapes surrounding us.

Pierogi is pleased to present recent work by Yoon Lee. This exhibition features large-scale paintings, made between 2013 and 2015, which revel in the complexity of Lee’s process and composition; they are visually complex, almost three-dimensional, dynamic abstractions.

Whereas Lee’s previous paintings tended to suggest movement through deep space, or whirlwinds of swirling motion, her recent paintings also reference observations from nature. With titles such as “Retribution (Bud),” Loose Rocks,” “A Storm of Sorts,” and “Bloom,” she sets her context clearly and emphasizes nuances in the subject and medium. “Loose Rocks” is informed by her passion for rock climbing. For this painting she worked from memory and photographs, from crude drawings of photos, with additional imagery referencing graphic novels. Clearly these are not movements toward realism, but are rather a truly ambitious reach, developing a sensitivity regarding the subjects. Her intent is an expressive understanding that’s powerful, through a subjective eye that doesn’t require a definitive answer or an esoteric conclusion.

Several of these paintings examine the process of the destruction of structure. The worlds contained within them are being taken apart piece by piece, layer by layer. “Retribution” and “Bloom,” whose titles and orientations seem to suggest opposite motivations, or tendencies – “Retribution,” oriented horizontally, suggests a blowback and disintegration toward the right side of the visual field, while “Bloom” is oriented vertically, as if it is exploding into being – are actually based on the same composition, with the order of the layers reversed. This reversal causes a shift in the depth of field, resulting in an altered spatial experience.

In “A Storm of Sorts” there is an entirely different painting underneath the uppermost layers of opaque and translucent white paint (the storm); the painting underneath is quite vivid but is then muted by the layers on top. This top layer could stand alone but becomes more complex because of the underpainting. When viewed more carefully, additional information and colors are revealed, creating more complexity, more push-pull.

Her process initially appears to borrow from action painting but Lee expands upon this intuitive process by using the computer – an inherently systematic device – as a tool to develop layers and structures before she applies paint to panel. In doing so, she creates an interesting dichotomy and dialogue between the two, between chaos and order.

“Making work that appears responsive to its time preoccupies many contemporary painters. Few find a resolution as persuasive as Yoon Lee’s.” (Kenneth Baker)

Yoon Lee was born in South Korea and grew up mainly in Southern California. She received a BA from UC San Diego and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has received numerous awards and residencies, including a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and the Eduardo Carrillo Prize from San Jose Museum of Art and Museo Eduardo Carrillo. This is her fourth one-person exhibition at Pierogi.

Studio10 presents “Pretext”, a group exhibition of work by Bjoern Meyer-Ebrecht, Isa Barrett, Joe Amrhein and Audra Wolowiec. The work in this exhibition bears a relationship to text and language and examines a place of becoming in the margins of language.

“They were less than words, just loose, meaningless syllables that flowed and merged, were fertilized and reborn in a single being only to break apart immediately afterwards, breathing, breathing...." - Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

Audra Wolowiec’s installation Habere, 2015 derives its title from the Latin meaning to inhabit. It consists of two speakers embedded in drywall on either side of a booth-like enclosure. Each side emits the recording of a breath. As the recordings synch in and out with each other the listener becomes aware of their own breath, implicating themselves in the dynamic. This shared experience initiates a pre-verbal place for experience. Our breath is exhaled from the body and even in the absence of words communicates our condition. The architecture of the installation adds to the heightened, wordless and intimate exchange holding the viewer as if in the pages of a book.

Joe Amrhein employs language appropriated from art criticism using the visual vocabulary he learned as a sign painter. He uses the materials of enamel and gold leaf on mylar for Swampland, 2009. Amrhein, distances his sources through formal arrangement, fragmentation and layering of the text. Integrating art criticism into the object it describes, Amrhein speaks the notion articulated by Robert Smithson who stated, “One must remember that writing on art replaces presence by absence by substituting the abstraction of language for the real thing.” In recent works Amrhein has incorporated translation into his text-based practice.

Alma-Isa Barrett uses late 19th to mid-20th century secondhand and found books in her practice of peeling printed words and images with Scotch tape while still preserving the texts. Some scientists maintain that the triboluminescence generated by peeling a roll of Scotch tape is the same power that lights the sun. Further, Soviet scientists ascertained that to peel tape In a vacuum is to produce X-rays. She selects single pages or complete texts of technical reference books, various literary works, and shorthand manuals among others. Barrett further augments and obscures the original features and illustrations of the page using archival black ink pens, straight rulers and various architectural templates. She leaves many books empty and uses a number of them as palimpsests for notes and drawing. She draws meticulously and obsessively on the sheets in geometric patterns creating repeating symmetries and relationships - some covering the text entirely with a blackened rectangle of transcendental mark making. The removed text is further hidden when the tape is wound into tight spools of varying sizes. Barrett's practice becomes an etymology borrowed from the language of others and reconfigured into alternative patterns of her own construct. The drawings become documents of multidimensional spaces.

In Björn Meyer-Ebrecht‘s work text appears as physical presence in form of discarded books, opening up the artist’s studio practice to a wider space of ideas and ideologies. The vocabulary of modernism becomes the tool to investigate not only form, color and geometry but also language through discarded books he considers at the end of their lifespan. His wooden sculptures are painted in bold delineations of color referencing constructivism and de stijl compositions.. Atop each sculpture is an aged, soft-back book secured in a freestanding and upright position. The wood stands are succinct architectural structures matched to the graphic identity of the book they host. Also included are geometric wall compositions of cloth book covers. The books are cut up and reassembled into flattened forms play with the illusionistic form of an opened book with splayed binding, the object exists simultaneously as an iconic image, and also remnant of the book itself and conjure the loaded visual and philosophical history of modernism.

For more information and images, please contact Annelie McGavin at (718) 852-4396).

The paintings in this exhibition are on the brink of quenching our thirst for a tale. They suggest, prompt, and hint, ultimately leaving the viewer to unfold the narrative. Whether painting a setting, small detail, or fuller scenario, these six artists wake up the storyteller in all of us.

Todd Bienvenu’s work focuses on the dark and hilarious side of Americana tempered with a deep understanding of art history and pop culture. He paints babes, boozers, buckets of blood, brawlers, and more. Katherine Bradford’s ambiguously narrative paintings hint at epic tales. Her extraordinary subjects have included ocean liners, superheroes, the sea, and most recently, outer space. Nicholas Borelli’s work draws from nature, biology, horror movies and science fiction. The figures he depicts struggle with the universal forces of entropy, loneliness, and anxiety. Fascinated by often unnoticed spaces, Hilary Doyle guides our eye to the evidence of others’ lives. Each detail is a clue to an imagined narrative: a paper cup from a lunch break, a teenager’s wad of gum, graffiti ghosts left by mysterious midnight cleaning crews. Through playful replication of surface texture, she draws us closer to the extraordinary aspects the banal. Kenny Rivero’s vignettes possess complex identities and specific historical auras. Rivero excavates, but he also builds. Most often there is a specific narrative within each work, a story layered with affiliations, loyalties, psycho-social histories, and per-
sonal as well as shared iconography. Made from collage and paint, Halley Zien’s densely populated surfaces suggest claustrophobic interior spaces packed with feverishly active, expressive figures. Her paintings, packed with manic characters, drag you into a world of psychodrama and tension.

Politics is a collection of attractive, compelling, entertaining art that looks to provoke a dialogue about world events. The artwork of Politics, whether protests in Cairo, America’s “war on terror” or water shortages, creates an open space for discussion and engagement, allowing viewers to reach their own conclusions. Each artist in Politics meets the challenge of making attractive artwork that addresses complex political subjects with a great deal of grace and skill.

Matthew Connors takes an artist’s eye to the frequently photographed protests in Tahrir Square. He captures the historic uprisings as well as subtle details like lasers cutting through the night, light hitting on a bombed-out car, tear gas falling out of the sky: images that speak to the interests of an artist rather than a reporter documenting spectacle alone. The moments Connors captures come closer to bearing witness than the more stylized photojournalism that traditionally mediates world events.

Michael Scoggins’s artwork comes from the vantage point of anyone who aspired from an early age to express themselves visually. This point of view creates a fascinating prism for world events, where it becomes clear that the political understanding of a preteen is, for better or worse, not far from the political understanding of most adults. Scoggins’s art results in insights about current events that are at times beautifully simple, loud or demonstrative.

Lisa Sanditz’s lush paintings reveal the ongoing droughts of the American Southwest. This environmental crisis created by endless consumption and misuse and by the hubris of development in the most inhospitable areas of our country. The landscape is seen in a halcyon dream of loose forms and intoxicating colors, much in the way that someone living on the edge of a struggling suburban development in the Southwest must face each day.

Matthew Connors (www.matthewconnors.com) was born in Port Washington, NY in 1976. He received a BA from the University of Chicago and an MFA from Yale University. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague and the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. He was awarded the MacDowell Colony Fellowship (2010) and the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship from the Yale School of Art (2004). Since 2004, he has been teaching at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design in Boston, where he is currently the Chair of the Photography Department. He lives and works in Boston, MA, and Brooklyn, NY.

Michael Scoggins (www.michaelscogginsins.tumblr.com) was born in Washington D.C. in 1973, growing up in Virginia and relocating later to Savannah, Georgia, where he gained an MFA in painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design (2006). In the summer of 2003 he attended the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. He has shown extensively, gained international recognition and has gallery representation in Atlanta, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Vienna and Seoul. His work is among the collections of MoMA, the Hammer, and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. Michael currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Lisa Sanditz (www.lisasanditz.com) received a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to China to continue her exploration of that country’s industrial landscapes and its single-industry cities, such as JinJiang (Shoe City) and Zhuji (Pearl City). She exhibited the resulting paintings from her several trips to China in group shows including: CRG Gallery in New York City; Galleria Glance in Torino, Italy; ACME Gallery in Los Angeles; and at the Shanghai Art Fair. Lisa Sanditz received a B.A. in studio art from Macalester College (1995) and an M.F.A. in painting (2001) from Pratt. She has had solo shows at CRG, New York, NY; Rodolphe Janssen Gallery in Brussels, BE; the Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO and many others. Sanditz’s works are held in private and permanent collections, including: the Columbus Art Museum; the Fogg Art Museum; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, among others.

n the summer of 2013 Andy Ness went to Rome and Morocco and recorded what he observed in sketchbooks. The distinct cultures of these two countries presented Ness with a wide range of new visual subjects—a vibrant color palette, Moorish architecture, and the massive ruins of a once grand empire. Upon his return, Ness created a sprawling series of drawings in which his pre-existing lexicon of pictorial forms, such as teeth, leopard pelts, and airplanes, commingled with what he had seen abroad.

These works have a bizarre narrative structure and seem as if they are being formed by memories which are simultaneously surfacing and fading. They do not strive for a superficial resolution but instead are layered with contradiction and dissonance. As an artist rooted in sculpture, it is enthralling to see Ness take full advantage of the medium of drawing and the way it permits a world ungoverned by the rules of gravity. In this series, Ness bends and collapses time and space with a sophisticated and poetic fluidity, conducting a broken parade through a crumbling city under the relentless sun of Northern Africa. forms are as permeable as they are discreet and often end up splayed open with their internal contents seeping out onto the page. Instability and vulnerability are at the forefront, yet Ness insists on presenting an underlying grace and humanity within it all.

Andy Ness lives and works in Minneapolis, Minn. He holds a BFA from the Pratt Institute and an MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has exhibited his work throughout the northeast and has attend numerous residencies including the Fine Arts Work Center, The MacDowell Colony, and the Vermont Studio Center.

The works presented in Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic raise questions about race, gender, and the politics of representation by portraying contemporary African American men and women using the conventions of traditional European portraiture. The exhibition includes an overview of the artist’s prolific fourteen-year career and features sixty paintings and sculptures.

Wiley's signature portraits of everyday men and women riff on specific paintings by Old Masters, replacing the European aristocrats depicted in those paintings with contemporary black subjects, drawing attention to the absence of African Americans from historical and cultural narratives.

The subjects in Wiley's paintings often wear sneakers, hoodies, and baseball caps, gear associated with hip-hop culture, and are set against contrasting ornate decorative backgrounds that evoke earlier eras and a range of cultures.

Through the process of “street casting,” Wiley invites individuals, often strangers he encounters on the street, to sit for portraits. In this collaborative process, the model chooses a reproduction of a painting from a book and reenacts the pose of the painting’s figure. By inviting the subjects to select a work of art, Wiley gives them a measure of control over the way they're portrayed.

The exhibition includes a selection of Wiley's World Stage paintings, begun in 2006, in which he takes his street casting process to other countries, widening the scope of his collaboration.

Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic is organized by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum. A fully illustrated catalogue published by the Brooklyn Museum and DelMonico Books • Prestel accompanies the exhibition.

This exhibition is made possible by the Henry Luce Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Grey Goose Vodka. Additional support is provided by Sotheby's, Ana and Lenny Gravier, John and Amy Phelan, Sean Kelly Gallery, Stephen Friedman Gallery, Roberts & Tilton, and Pamela K. and William A. Royall, Jr.

July 11, 2014, NEW YORK, NY—Public Art Fund and Forest City Ratner Companies (FCRC) announce Sam Falls: Light Over Time, an exhibition at MetroTech Commons featuring five new artworks that encourage the participation of visitors and explore the effects of
the natural environment and time on the materials and forms of the work. Several of the pieces on view—like a seesaw, wind chimes, and bench—will seem familiar to any park visitor, however, Falls has transformed the function and form of these traditional objects: the
temperature-sensitive surface of the bench changes color under the body heat of a seated visitor, while Falls’ oversized wind chimes can be activated by visitors or tinkle brightly on a gusty day. These experiential works invite visitors to see the sculptures both as works of art and usable objects, inspiring a sense of curiosity, discovery, and exploration in a familiar space. Sam Falls: Light Over Time will be on view at MetroTech Commons, Downtown Brooklyn, July 30, 2014 – May 29, 2015.

“As a place that revolves around thinking, working, and having fun, MetroTech is the ideal venue for Sam Falls’ new work,” said Nicholas Baume, Public Art Fund Director & Chief Curator. “Falls takes on big questions about art, culture, and the environment with a lightness of touch that will leave visitors both delighted and engaged with the world around them.”

FCRC, the developer of MetroTech Center, has been Public Art Fund’s partner in presenting exhibitions at this site for more than twenty years. “Downtown Brooklyn is already home to many important cultural destinations including the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Brooklyn Bridge Park, and Barclays Center,” said David L.
Berliner, FCRC’s Chief Operating Officer and the executive responsible for overseeing the Company’s various art programs. “This exhibition will provide yet another draw for visitors and an opportunity for residents to interact with culture in the borough.”

Falls works in diverse mediums from sculpture and fabric, to photography and painting. While his work is often in dialogue with the photographic process, he has more recently addressed the processes of organic change, such as the long-term effects of sunlight, rain, and time on various materials. This focus, as well as his interest in the history of minimalist sculpture, is especially evident in the five new works for MetroTech Commons. At the entrance to the exhibition (Jay
Street and Myrtle Avenue), visitors can leave a personal, if temporary, imprint on a one-of-a kind
bench designed by the artist. The work utilizes temperature-sensitive glass tiles that change color in a range of bright hues in response to the heat of visitors’ bodies. Echoing the appearance of this Technicolor glass are two “light rooms”—small, single-person, white
aluminum structures with marbled glass “roofs.” As the sun moves across the sky, an ever changing stream of light will pass through the glass bathing visitors and the interior space with light. As heat and light affect these two works, so does sound play a role in Falls’ colorful,
human-scale wind chimes. Every chime represents a specific note, allowing each visitor to create a unique melody that blends with the ambient sounds of the plaza. Drawing on conventional playground elements, the artist’s take on the seesaw looks to the weather, in
addition to visitors, to activate it. Over the course of the show, rain and snow will collect in buckets at each end of the long central plank, transforming the function of the object into that of a scale with the balance depending on the weight at each end. And at the center of the exhibition, installed among the trees of the Commons, is Falls’ large-scale modular sculpture in the form of a maze that encourages visitors to leave Myrtle Promenade’s sidewalks behind and explore the plaza’s treed, central space. Created from vibrant aluminum panels that are alternately painted with UV protectant or simply powder-coated, the colors of
the panels will continue to change as the work is exposed to the sun and the panels cast shadows
on one another.

“By combining forms that utilize the geometry of minimalist sculpture with a similarly systematic approach to color and process, Falls’ work invites audiences to physically engage with it, while considering the conceptual underpinnings of its making,” said Public Art Fund Associate Curator Andria Hickey, who curated the exhibition. “There is an element of time and temporality inherent in Falls’ work that he has expanded on through these new commissions; the appearance and experience of the work will change as each object reacts to the
elements over time.”

With a focus on exhibitions featuring new commissions, past exhibitions at MetroTech Commons have included artists like Vito Acconci, Martin Basher, Chakaia Booker, Matthew Day Jackson, Esther Kläs, Ryan McGinness, Dave McKenzie, Jason Middlebrook, Adam Pendleton, Erin Shirreff, Valeska Soares, Do-Ho Suh, and most recently, Katharina Grosse—many of whom were presenting their first work in the public sphere. Falls continues this tradition with Light Over Time, his first major commission in New York as well as his first outdoor exhibition in the city.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sam Falls (b. 1984, San Diego, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has recently been shown at LAXART (Los Angeles), Museo MADRE (Naples), International Center of Photography (New York), American Academy in Rome, Fotografiska (Stockholm), and the Woodstock Center for Photography (New York). Forthcoming exhibitions of his work will be presented in 2014 by the Zabludowicz Collection (London) and the Pomona College Museum of Art (California), and in 2015 at the Guiliani Foundation (Rome), Ballroom Marfa (Texas), and the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles). His work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,
and the International Center for Photography, New York, among others. He received his BA from Reed College and his MFA from ICP-Bard. He has self-published more than ten books, including Color Dying Light (Hassla, 2009), Dans la Chambre Verte (JSBJ, 2010), Light Work (Gottlund Verlag, 2010) and Visible Library (Lay Flat, 2011). Falls is represented by Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, and Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles.

VISITING THE EXHIBITION
MetroTech Commons is located in Downtown Brooklyn between Jay Street and Flatbush Avenue at Myrtle Avenue. Viewing hours are dawn to dusk daily.

SUPPORT
Sam Falls: Light Over Time at MetroTech Commons is part of an ongoing program organized by the Public Art Fund, and sponsored by MetroTech Commons Associates and MetroTech companies including Forest City Ratner Companies, JPMorganChase, National Grid, WellChoice, and Polytechnic Institute of New York University. Special thanks to Forest City Ratner Companies and First New York Partners.

Additional support is provided by Hannah Hoffman Gallery and Galerie Eva Presenhuber.

Special assistance with Untitled (Thermochromic bench, 1) has been provided by Moving Color Studios.

Public Art Fund exhibitions are supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

ABOUT PUBLIC ART FUND
Public Art Fund brings dynamic contemporary art to a broad audience in New York City by mounting ambitious free exhibitions of international scope and impact that offer the public powerful experiences with art and the urban environment.